Search
Can you rotate the cursor in CSS?
28.8.2019
Kinda! There is no simple or standard way to do it, but it's possible. You can change the cursor to different built-in native versions with CSS with the cursor property, but that doesn't help much here. You can also use that property to set a static image as the cursor. But again that doesn't help...
Going Buildless
27.8.2019
I'm in a long distance relationship. That means I’m on a plane to England every few weeks, and every time I'm on that plane, I think about how nice it would be to read some Reddit posts. What I could do is find a Reddit app that lets me cache posts for offline (I’m sure there is one out there),...
More Flexible Online Stores WooCommerce and Gutenberg Blocks
27.8.2019
Blocks have become an indispensable component for managing content in WordPress since the Gutenberg editor was officially released earlier this year. Not only does WordPress include some nifty blocks right out of the box, but we're starting to see plugin developers take advantage of them...
Reusable Popovers to Add a Little Pop
26.8.2019
A popover is a transient view that shows up on top of a content on the screen when a user clicks on a control button or within a defined area. For example, clicking on an info icon on a specific list item to get the item details. Typically, a popover includes an arrow pointing to the location from...
45 Web Tools To Master The Internet (Sponsored)
26.8.2019
A big part of our daily jobs is accomplished with much ease and efficiency by using different web tools and services. There is no doubt that for any type of need there is a great solution that is doing its job. In this article, we are reviewed on short 45 web tools and services that […]
The...
Jeremy Keith – Building the Web
23.8.2019
I really enjoyed this interview with Jeremy Keith on the state of the web, how things have changed in recent years and why he’s a mix of optimistic and nervous for the future.
One thing that caught my attention during the interview more than anything was where Jeremy started discussing how folks...
Multiplayer Tic Tac Toe with GraphQL
23.8.2019
GraphQL is a query language for APIs that is very empowering for front-end developers. As the GraphQL site explains it, you describe your data, ask for what you want, and get predictable results.
If you haven’t worked with it before, GraphQL might be a little confusing to grok at first glance....
Weekly Platform News: Improving UX on Slow Connections, a Tip for Writing Alt Text and a Polyfill for the HTML loading attribute
23.8.2019
In this week's roundup, how to determine a slow connection, what we should put into alt text for images, and a new polyfill for the HTML loading attribute, plus more.
Detecting users on slow connections
Algolia is using the Network Information API (see the API’s Chrome status page) to detect users...
Advice for Technical Writing
22.8.2019
In advance of a recent podcast with the incredible technical writer and Smashing Magazine editor-in-chief Rachel Andrew, I gathered up a bunch of thoughts and references on the subject of technical writing. So many smart people have said a lot of smart things over the years that I thought I'd round...
Navbar Nudging on @keyframers
22.8.2019
I got to be the featured guest over on The Keyframers the other day. We looked at a Dribbble shot by Björgvin Pétur Sigurjónsson and then slowly built it, taking some purposeful detours along the way to discuss various tech.
We start by considering doing it entirely in CSS, then go for some light...
Using requestAnimationFrame with React Hooks
21.8.2019
Animating with requestAnimationFrame should be easy, but if you haven’t read React’s documentation thoroughly then you will probably run into a few things that might cause you a headache. Here are three gotcha moments I learned the hard way.
TLDR: Pass an empty array as a second parameter...
Other Ways to SPAs
21.8.2019
That rhymed lolz.
I mentioned on a podcast the other day that I sorta think WordPress should ship with Turbolinks. It's a rather simple premise:
Build a server-rendered site.
Turbolinks intercepts clicks on same-origin links.
It uses AJAX for the HTML of the new page and replaces the current page...
Getting Netlify Large Media Going
20.8.2019
I just did this the other day so I figured I'd blog it up. There is a thing called Git Large File Storage (Git LFS). Here's the entire point of it: it keeps large files out of your repo directly. Say you have 500MB of images on your site and they kinda need to be in the repo so you can work with...
Let’s Build a JAMstack E-Commerce Store with Netlify Functions
20.8.2019
A lot of people are confused about what JAMstack is. The acronym stands for JavaScript, APIs, and Markup, but truly, JAMstack doesn’t have to include all three. What defines JAMstack is that it’s served without web servers. If you consider the history of computing, this type of abstraction isn’t...
Lazy load embedded YouTube videos
20.8.2019
This is a very clever idea via Arthur Corenzan. Rather than use the default YouTube embed, which adds a crapload of resources to a page whether the user plays the video or not, use the little tiny placeholder webpage that is just an image you can click that is linked to the YouTube embed.
It still...
Using rel=”preconnect” to establish network connections early and increase performance
20.8.2019
Milica Mihajlija:
Adding rel=preconnect to a <link> informs the browser that your page intends to establish a connection to another domain, and that you'd like the process to start as soon as possible. Resources will load more quickly because the setup process has already been completed...
Bounce Element Around Viewport in CSS
19.8.2019
Let's say you were gonna bounce an element all around a screen, sorta like an old school screensaver or Pong or something.
You'd probably be tracking the X location of the element, increasing or decreasing it in a time loop and — when the element reached the maximum or minimum value —...
Can you view print stylesheets applied directly in the browser?
19.8.2019
Yep.
Let's take a look at how to do it in different browsers. Although note the date of this blog post. This stuff tends to change over time, so if anything here is wrong, let us know and we can update it.
In Firefox...
It's a little button in DevTools. So easy!
Open DevTools...
Draggin’ and Droppin’ in React
16.8.2019
The React ecosystem offers us a lot of libraries that all are focused on the interaction of drag and drop. We have react-dnd, react-beautiful-dnd, react-drag-n-drop and many more, but some of them require quite a lot of work to build even a simple drag and drop demo, and some do not provide...
Accessibility and web performance are not features, they’re the baseline
16.8.2019
This week I’ve been brooding about web performance and accessibility. It all began when Ethan Marcotte made a lot of great notes about the accessibility issues that are common with AMP:
In the recordings above, I’m trying to navigate through the AMP Story. And as I do, VoiceOver describes a page...